My new website reveal - eSports Noob

[thegrogster]

http://esports-noob.com/

There's a LOT that needs to be added, but it's live right now.

I don't know what my ultimate goal is of the website is, other than keeping a bit of news going as well as having a central place for links to guides, streams and updates about the goings on in every even remotely popular eSport.

I could really use some help keeping it up to date and keeping the pages themselves from going stale so if any of you would like to pick and specific game (or multiple games) it would help out.

I might have to set it up to require sign-ups to comment, but hopefully I won't. There are ads on there because I'm not accepting donations and I won't until I need to move this setup out of my house. (It's currently running on just a dual core PC with 2GB RAM with a 1.5Mbps upload. If I need to I'll shift everything to Amazon. I don't pay for that connection so it's the perfect project starter.)

I also don't have a forum set up, but it is a plan in the not to distant future if I see the page views jump up. Currently discussions are limited to the comments.

Let me know what you think, if I'm an idiot for doing this, what you think needs to change/be added and so on before I go nuts with advertising it.

Why the name? Because I really am a noob when it comes to eSports. And I want other noobs to have a place to look at and see what's available in the ever growing field.

I learned so damn much about Ubuntu Server, Apache2, vsftpd and various other tools in the weeks I spent just trying to find a damn layout. It's more of a project than a permanent thing, but if it takes off I'd be ridiculously happy.

I also discovered I hate Drupal.

[Boss1000]

Well, the first question that should be thrown out is, "What's the goal?" "What's the big picture?" But you said you aren't quite sure yet.

Do you think this fills a void in the competitive gaming scene with all the SCII, TF2, Dota, etc. coverage? CommFT and those SCII channels already have a big infrastructure and following. Is your plan to synthesize that information?

I think a lot of this hinges on you getting manpower to keep up. Do you think you can get that?

The site looks really nice. Nicer than ours. How'd you figure and implement the look and feel?

[thegrogster]

The look and feel are actually templates, plugins and small amount of time with code tweaking. I've been hacking away at this for weeks before I showed anyone but myself. (Mostly trying to make sure the back-end was good enough)

My current goal is to get as much basic coverage as possible for every game I can to allow people to have somewhere to go to get even remotely interested in either watching esports or becoming a pro player (that last one will come later). That's why I will hopefully have streams, guides, twitter feeds and news across the board at the very least linked from this website. A central information dump sort of thing.

CommFT and TeamLiquid.net are great, this will sort out that information and point people to little tournaments to large events for every game without having to go across multiple websites.

[rriven]

The site looks good. I take it you are using Drupal, did you try others, why stick with Drupal? You don't have to answer, I am very curious why people choose the tools they do.

[thegrogster]

The site looks good. I take it you are using Drupal, did you try others, why stick with Drupal? You don't have to answer, I am very curious why people choose the tools they do.

Actually, I tried Drupal for a few weeks, just trying to get it sorted out. It was such a pain to use Drupal from scratch that I scrapped it and started over. Getting it installed properly wasn't so bad. Finding the folders to give permissions to for updates and such took a few hours of googling. Setting a basic layout was too much. Playing with an existing Drupal site was fine too because the tools were already set out for you. The same can be said about Joomla. Joomla, however, has a very clean interface for background management. Drupal's interface looks like a cluster-fuck in comparison. I just couldn't figure out what folders to give permissions to for updating, FTP and all that jazz.

Right now the website is actually using Wordpress with a very nice, slightly modified theme.

I chose Wordpress because I also have it running therealgrogster.com (my personal blog that's going to die soon). It's insanely easy to use, quick to set up and has thousands upon thousands of themes, plugins and widgets all ready to go and help out. I have yet to get the twitter plugin working, though.

[rriven]

Actually, I tried Drupal for a few weeks, just trying to get it sorted out. It was such a pain to use Drupal from scratch that I scrapped it and started over. Getting it installed properly wasn't so bad. Finding the folders to give permissions to for updates and such took a few hours of googling. Setting a basic layout was too much. Playing with an existing Drupal site was fine too because the tools were already set out for you. The same can be said about Joomla. Joomla, however, has a very clean interface for background management. Drupal's interface looks like a cluster-fuck in comparison. I just couldn't figure out what folders to give permissions to for updating, FTP and all that jazz.

Right now the website is actually using Wordpress with a very nice, slightly modified theme.

I chose Wordpress because I also have it running therealgrogster.com (my personal blog that's going to die soon). It's insanely easy to use, quick to set up and has thousands upon thousands of themes, plugins and widgets all ready to go and help out. I have yet to get the twitter plugin working, though.

I will agree with Wordpress, in 5 minutes you can have a site up and running with content. There are endless plugins and themes for it also.

I played with both Joomla and Drupal when i was in College 3 years ago. There were unploised then and it sounds like very little has changed.